Children learn the mechanics of turning book pages at an early age. They enjoy looking at pictures on pages, and hearing any accompanying text read-aloud. Many children have favorite books that they like to hear read over and over again. The association of seeing pictures and repeatedly hearing the words is an excellent mechanism for learning to read and learning to enjoy books.
In accordance with one embodiment of the present invention, these childhood reading experiences are complemented through use of machine-readable data in books that permit children to hear the text of a book even when an adult is not available to assist them.
In one particular arrangement, the pages of a book are marked in a generally human-imperceptible manner using digital watermark technology. For example, a story illustration (or the background of a page of text) can be subtly changed, in local luminance detail, to encode a 32 bit number (a page identifier). When the child presents the page to a web cam or the like, associated image data is sensed and processed to recover the 32 bit identifier. This identifier can then be used (locally, or by transmission to a remote data repository) to index multimedia data that is then presented to the child, as read-aloud spoken text.
The foregoing and additional features and advantages of the invention will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.